Fish and microchips at Tate Modern's Turbine Hall - review

It’s not often you enter a gallery to find a section of the ceiling descending towards you at a rate of knots. And, when the gallery in question is Tate Modern’s dauntingly enormous Turbine Hall, the effect is at once exhilarating and faintly alarming. Elsewhere in this cavernous space, lights flash on and off apparently at random, while a grinding industrial “music” roars through scores of specially installed speakers. Your first eerie impression of Anywhen, French artist Philippe Parreno’s 2016 Turbine Hall commission is that this enormous room’s operating functions have been taken over by some alien force – which, to a degree, is what has happened.

Born in 1962, Parreno is known for creating vast, multi-sensory experiences that turn entire institutions into single artworks: “dramatic compositions”, as he thinks of them, that fuse film, light, sound and performance. In this, the second Turbine Hall commission to be sponsored by Hyundai, he has wired the Turbine Hall’s operating systems, its sound and lighting facilities, to a single console, turning the building from a coherently operating utilitarian space into a set of functions that can be “played” like a musical instrument.

Horizontal and vertical panels slide through the air around you creating the sense of being in some vast moving abstract sculpture, while ambient sounds beamed in from outside – the roar of a passing van, the scream of a police siren – seem to collapse the barriers between the interior and exterior of the building.

If that doesn’t seem sufficiently challenging – some might say bonkers – Parreno has unleashed a fleet of silver fish in the form of helium-filled balloons whose random floating movement disrupts the rigid geometry of the surrounding space. The moving screens, meanwhile, cohere into the semblance of a cinema showing a film featuring comedian and ventriloquist Nina Conti and a (real) cuttlefish.

Can it scale new heights? Philippe Parreno's Anywhen, at Tate ModernCredit:
Eddie Mulholland

There’s more. Rather than running through a set presentation with a beginning a middle and an end, Anywhen is designed to work in a continuous, ever-changing unrepeatable flow, determined by the activity of bacteria maintained in a small laboratory in the corner of the hall. Scientists from University College London will feed mathematical data on the temperature, growth and movement of live yeast cultures into the computer algrorithm controlling the sequencing of the work, which will play an increasing role in determining the course of the work over the six months of its existence.

This, then, is a Frankenstein’s Monster of an artwork with the capacity to totally transform itself, controlled by bacteria, which are, it might be argued, the very essence of life. For all its sense of breathless newness, the work harks back to one of the essential and enduring polarities of modern art: between abstract, geometrical order, on the one hand, and the random, anarchic functions of chance on the other.

The weak link in the whole thing is the film in which Conti, a puppeteer who controls her performances without opening her mouth, delivers a barely intelligible ventriloquised monologue on chance and control, while that cuttlefish – a creature that communicates by changing its shape and colour – unfurls its gelatinous form in footage that wouldn’t be out of place in a David Attenborough documentary. While the film tries to set up a metaphorical interaction between these two “performers”, it remains ill-focused. You’re left with the sense of a rather desperate attempt to inject human interest and pedantic intellectual meaning into a work whose strengths lie in enigmatic suggestion rather than overt statement – in what it doesn’t say, rather than what it does.

Entertaining and provocative though it is, whether Anywhen will go down as one of the classic Turbine Hall commissions will depend on whether its rather disparate collection of elements coheres in a way that captures the public imagination, or indeed if its cutting-edge technology still feels cutting-edge – particularly to younger gallery-goers – in six months time. As to whether the work will radically transform itself over the period of its existence, I suspect it will look and sound pretty much the same as it does now, I’d love to be proved wrong.